Based on the folklore of Baba Yaga, Blacktail is a fantasy FPS with survival overtones. You play Yaga, the twin sister to Zora who’s disappeared, along with a number of other children from the village. You’re cast as a misfit, an outsider who’s shunned by the locals.
You soon begin to see why.
First and foremost there’s the voice you start hearing in your head. That, combined with the visions you suffer when you sleep, aren’t exactly what you’d term normal. It’s an oddly modern-sounding voice too, as are many of the English-speaking voice actors, which sit at odds with the fantastical setting, and the vocal-heavy Slavic folk music.
There’s a morality system at play in Blacktail, with your decisions having an impact on both the story and how you’re perceived by other characters in the game. This starts at the very opening as you opt to follow the dark or the light path, and you’ll find some interesting little touches along the way that shape who you are, such as choosing whether you knock an apple off a tree for a peckish hedgehog or leave them to starve. It’s a cute hedgehog, so only the absolute worst of you are letting him go hungry.
There’s often little explanation of what’s going to earn you positive or negative standing, and you have to learn not to simply shoot arrows at everything within your field of vision if you’re hoping to stay on the side of the light – I guess this applies to real life as well?
Your moral standing also affects some of your skills, with difference hocuses – magic spells – becoming available depending on which way you’re leaning. Each time you perform an action the morality meter appears in the corner of the screen, and you can also look back on your most recent actions to see how you’re fairing.
I found it a lot easier to be evil. You don’t have to worry about shooting bird nests out of trees and you can relish sending a swarm of aggressive ants into the village. It felt a bit like a self-fulfilling prophecy, given the less-than-positive folklore that surrounds Baba Yaga, but I suppose you can be kind if you want to.
The survival elements extend to hunting for sustenance and crafting consumables, so you have to search each area for wood and feathers to make arrows, find ingredients for potions, while taking down deer to cook for meat. There’s a mini-game for cooking where you have to catch the flames to correctly braise it, giving you the chance to achieve temporary status effects. Cook well and you might get faster or gain regenerative powers. Cook poorly and you might poison yourself or find your mind addled.
Blacktail doesn’t hold your hand, and from the outset it feels as dissonant as the central character’s mind. Characters, narrative and gameplay features are thrust upon you in a strangely hodge-podge manner, and it takes a while for both it, and you, to settle into place. Thankfully, the opening is intriguing, and there’s an attractive world to explore, which ensures that you’re going to continue on the adventure.
Some things start to grate the further you get into the game, and the voice acting, though of a perfectly serviceable nature, undoes the setting and narrative focus of the game. Firstly, it’s entirely US or UK-based accents for a start; surely there are a host of Slavic voice actors who could have lent their talents here? Secondly, the writing feels too modern, too on-the-nose for the era it’s depicting. Whoever felt that a giant talking mushroom should call something ‘B.S.’ hadn’t thought it through. It gives everything the air of a Warner Bros. teen fantasy TV soap, rather than the dark fantasy I was expecting.
Whether you take to that tone will, almost certainly, decide whether you make it to the credits or not. Blacktail does many things right – the world is beauftifully realised, its combat is rewarding, and the boss battles are deeply challenging, putting your reactions to the test – but that incongruous tone just didn’t work for me. Other annoyances like unskippable cutscenes and off-kilter save points tarnish the experience further. You can even get stuck in a save loop if you are succumbing to poison and don’t have any antidote to hand.
